Rabid Monkeys and Salesmanship

Well we're pretty much killing time now. We were originally supposed to leave Phnom Penh a week ago, but then found out that getting a Burmese visa takes 7 days and that'd we'd get it on Friday the 4th (yesterday. However, as Michelle noted in the last message, I got bit by a monkey, which has made things more complicated. I e-mailed a western doctor in town asking if there was any risk from the monkey I 'met', and also did a lot of searching for information on the rabies threat specifically within Phnom Penh. I learned that rabies kills more people here than Dengue Fever and Malaria combined, and the doctor responded immediately telling me to come in ASAP. I visited him on Thursday and started the 5 shot vaccination plan. You have to get the shots on certain days, and Phnom Penh is the only city in the whole country you can do it, so we're going to have to stay here a bit longer to get the first 2, go to the beach for a few days, and then head to Bangkok where we can get the rest right before we fly to Myanmar. I'm fine though, insurance covers most of the vaccination (after you're bitten, they won't cover anything preventative), and we're both glad I'm not taking the risk by skipping the vaccination.

We've tried to illustrate in some of our previous blog posts how aggressive and numerous the salesman are around here. Be it for food, taxi rides, books, or anything else, we seem to be under constant assault (as westerners) from these good people who are trying to scrape out a living. In an effort to give a better picture of just how many of these people there are, yesterday I counted how many offers we got. This came about partly of boredom, but I thought it could be interesting too. The offers I decided to count are ONLY for transportation services such as taxis, motorbike rides, and tuk-tuks (a kind of 2 wheeled carriage hooked to the back of a motorbike). When walking the city these drivers will ask if you want a ride, and if you say no they'll often start shouting out the names of tourist destinations, presumably hoping to hit one that interests you. Anyway, the grand total for yesterday was 103. In about 4.5 hours of walking, we got offered a ride 103 times, not including duplicate offers from the same people. This also doesn't include the infinite number of offers for drinks, books, restaurants, pot (very common for me), cocaine (rare), opium (even more rare) or just general begging on the streets. [Note: we don't any drugs, period]. We've known we get asked a lot, but eventually you just learn to ignore it and you start to forget how often it really is.

Assuming everything goes smoothly, our next post should be from the beach!